Dancing Plagues & Birthday Surprises: June 24th's Unforgettable Moments

On June twenty-fourth, thirteen seventy-four, in the city of Aachen, Germany, people began to dance in the streets. And they didn't stop. Yesterday, we talked about history's delightfully surprising moments, how the past can feel so alive. But this... this was different. This wasn't a celebration. It was a compulsion, a madness that seized hundreds, who danced until they collapsed from exhaustion, some until their hearts gave out. It was the first documented outbreak of the Dancing Plague. And it's a stark reminder that on any given day in history, alongside the triumphs of science and art, something profoundly strange can be waiting just around the corner.

June twenty-fourth is a day of extremes. In two thousand ten, it gave us the conclusion of the longest tennis match in history. John Isner and Nicolas Mahut battled at Wimbledon for eleven hours and five minutes, spread over three grueling days. An epic of human endurance. And on this day in fifteen thirty-five, a Spanish bishop named Fray Tomás de Berlanga was sailing to Peru when his ship was blown wildly off course. He washed up on a strange, volcanic archipelago teeming with fearless, bizarre creatures. He had accidentally discovered the Galápagos Islands.

He had no way of knowing it, but he'd just stumbled upon the place that would, three hundred years later, give Charles Darwin the key to unlocking the theory of natural selection. A navigational error that re-wrote our understanding of life itself. It’s also a day for legends to be born. In nineteen forty-seven, Mick Fleetwood came into the world, the impossibly tall, endlessly energetic drummer who would co-found Fleetwood Mac—a band that didn't just sell one hundred and twenty million records, but created the actual soundtrack for countless lives. And forty years later, in nineteen eighty-seven, a boy named Lionel Messi was born in Rosario, Argentina.

He would go on to become, for so many, the greatest soccer player to ever touch a ball. Two different kinds of magic, born on the same day. The day’s magic can be literal, too. On June twenty-fourth, fifteen ninety, William Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream was likely first performed. A story of fairies and mixed-up lovers that still feels fresh and funny and deeply human over four hundred years later. It’s no coincidence, maybe, that today is also celebrated as International Fairy Day. A little bit of whimsy in the calendar. But the day isn’t just about art and accidents.

It’s about seeing the invisible. In sixteen forty-three, the Italian scientist Evangelista Torricelli invented the barometer. For the first time, humanity had a tool to prove the existence of atmospheric pressure—to measure the weight of the very air we breathe. It was the foundational act of modern meteorology. Suddenly, the weather wasn't just divine will; it was a system, something that could be understood, even predicted. And speaking of seeing things, on this day in fourteen ninety-seven, the Italian navigator John Cabot, sailing for England, landed somewhere in what we now call Newfoundland.

He was the first European to set foot on mainland North America since the Vikings, centuries earlier. Another link in the chain of events that would utterly reshape the world. Even in our own time, the discoveries continue. On June twenty-fourth, two thousand eleven, scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope found two more moons orbiting the dwarf planet Pluto. Tiny worlds named Kerberos and Styx, spotted from millions of miles away. A reminder that even in our own solar system, there are still secrets to uncover. So we have this incredible tapestry. A plague of dancing, a tennis match that wouldn't end, the birth of rock and football gods, and the discovery of islands that would change biology forever.

But I want to go back. I want to sit with two of these moments. The dancing in Aachen, and the bishop landing in the Galápagos. Because looking at them together tells us something profound about the nature of discovery. One is a terrifying journey inward, into the chaos of the human mind. The other is a journey outward, to the edge of the known world. Let’s go back to Aachen, thirteen seventy-four. Try to picture it. It’s not a festival. There are no musicians, at least not at first. People, men and women, just start… twitching. Then jerking. Then dancing, uncontrollably.

They form circles, they hold hands, they leap and scream. They aren't happy. They're in agony. They complain of visions, of demons. They beg for priests to help them, but they cannot stop their bodies. This goes on for days. Weeks. It spreads to other towns along the Rhine. Looking back, we call it choreomania, or mass psychogenic illness. It's a label. It gives us the comfort of a category. But it doesn't explain it. Not really. The leading theories are… well, they’re guesses. One is ergot poisoning. A fungus that grows on damp rye can cause hallucinations and muscle spasms.

It's plausible. But it doesn't quite fit the organized, dancing nature of the mania. Another theory points to extreme psychological stress. The Black Death had ravaged Europe just a few decades earlier. Life was brutal, short, and saturated with a kind of apocalyptic religious fervor. Maybe… maybe a whole community just snapped. A collective psychological break. The contemporary chroniclers, of course, blamed demons. Or divine punishment. What’s so powerful about this moment, looking back from now, is its resistance to a clean explanation. We like to think we have the human mind mapped.

We have neuroscience, we have psychology. But thirteen seventy-four is a ghost in that machine. It’s a moment that shows us a frightening possibility: that under the right—or wrong—conditions, the software of the human psyche can be collectively, catastrophically corrupted. We see echoes of it today, in the rapid spread of misinformation, in viral social panics. The technology is different, but the mechanism… the unnerving tendency for a shared delusion to take hold of a crowd… that feels chillingly familiar. The dancing plague is a historical mirror, showing us a capacity for collective breakdown that we pretend we've outgrown.

We haven't. We've just found new reasons to dance. Now, let's leave the suffocating chaos of that German street and travel across time and space. To the wide-open Pacific Ocean, in fifteen thirty-five. Fray Tomás de Berlanga, the Bishop of Panama, is on his way to Peru to mediate a dispute between conquistadors. A noble, if political, mission. But the ocean doesn't care about his mission. The winds die. The currents seize his ship and pull it west, far off the charts. For days, they drift, running out of water. They are lost. And then, they see them. Islands. Black, volcanic, looking like, in his words, "the dregs of God's creation." They land, desperate for water.

And what they find is a nightmare landscape populated by alien creatures. Giant tortoises, marine iguanas that sneeze salt, birds that pay them no mind. It is so unlike anything they have ever seen. Berlanga and his men see it as a worthless, hellish place. They find a little water, escape as soon as they can, and he writes a letter to the King of Spain, essentially describing this bizarre detour. And that’s it. For him, the story is over. It was an ordeal. An interruption. But for us, looking back, the story is just beginning. Because that letter put those islands on a map.

They were named Las Encantadas—the Enchanted Isles. And three hundred years later, another ship, the HMS Beagle, would arrive, carrying a young naturalist named Charles Darwin. And on those same islands, seeing those same "bizarre" creatures—the finches with their different beaks, the tortoises with their different shells from island to island—Darwin had the epiphany that would become the theory of evolution by natural selection. The delight in this story is the sheer, beautiful accident of it. Berlanga wasn't looking for a new world of biology. He was looking for fresh water.

Darwin wasn't the first to see the islands; he was just the first to arrive with the right questions in his mind. What the retrospective view gives us here is a lesson in the nature of significance. A discovery's importance is almost never understood in the moment it's made. Berlanga saw a useless pile of rocks. We see the cradle of modern biology. The moment of discovery was in fifteen thirty-five. The moment of understanding came in eighteen thirty-five. It took three hundred years for the world to be ready for what the Bishop had found. So you have these two poles of June twenty-fourth.

One event where people looked inside themselves and found a terrifying, inexplicable madness. And another where a man looked at the outside world and found a place of wonder he couldn't begin to comprehend. The dancing plague shows us the limits of our self-knowledge. The Galápagos discovery shows us the limits of our perception. Both events are about stumbling into something vast and mysterious. In Aachen, it was the hidden architecture of the human mind. In the Pacific, it was the hidden architecture of life itself. This is what history on a day like this offers.

Not just a list of names and dates, but a map. A map of our own blind spots. It shows us the moments when humanity tripped and fell into a deeper reality—whether it was the reality of a shared psychosis, or the reality of a shared ancestry with every living thing. June twenty-fourth is a day that invented a way to measure the air, and a day that showed us our minds are not always our own. It’s a day for discovering new worlds, both on the globe, and on the dark, uncharted moons of Pluto. It tells us that the greatest discoveries aren't about finding answers.

They're about finding out we've been asking the wrong questions all along.